Syntactic account of Persian Apposition and Nonrestrictive Relative Clause

Persian relative clauses are the complex DP containing head and CP. These two make a syntactic constituent and have DP distribution. Following the SOV word order, the base generated position of them is an argument position before verb which can be changed by movement operations. DP embedded CP is introduced by the invariable complementizer (ke) and the embedded verbs are inflected for tense, aspect and mood just as a main verb. Nonrestrictive relative clause is a subordinate clause which does not restrict the meaning of the head it modifies but stands in apposition to it. Nonrestrictive relative clauses are syntactically the same as restrictive relative clauses, i.e. they go through various grammatical operations in the same way. However nonrestrictive relative clauses are similar to the parentheticals (particularly apposition) in the prosodic and semantic aspects. They have distinctive prosodic contour, that is, discontinuity and parentheticals’ semantic contribution to the matrix clause is an additional or supplementive one. one.In this article an attempt is made to show these differences by structural representation: the apposition as a cooperated construction and nonrestrictive relative clause as right –adjoined to the head noun.